A Fleet of Destroyers

This week E-Reads added some two dozen titles to its list of Destroyer action adventure novels by Warren Murphy and Warren Sapir, bringing our current total to 50. E-Reads has about 50 more titles in inventory, so you may be sure the supply is not going to run out any time soon.

At last count there were over 140 Destroyer novels, not including the many books in other series that Warren Murphy (his co-creator passed away many years ago) has generated. For those of you who have written a novel, or who have labored over your masterpiece for five or ten years, it's almost incomprehensible that one writer can be so prolific. It calls for determination, discipline, inventiveness and nimble fingers to produce hundreds of books over a career (and Murphy is still going strong), but as remarkable as it may seem to the lay reader or weekend novelist, Murphy is by no means the world's champion. The French thriller writer Simenon boasted over 1000 books and there may be others of similar fecundity. Having written potboilers myself years ago I am not at all surprised. At 5000 words a day, I was able to complete a novel in about two weeks. Granting an author his or her sabbaths and a couple of weeks per year of vacation, that's still about 20 or 25 books a year. Over an effective career of, say, forty years, that puts us close to 1000 titles.

But -- are they any good? Well, Warren Murphy's army of fans thinks so, and so do we. For a more detailed look at prolific authors, read about the bet I made twenty-five years ago that I know authors who can write books faster than publishers can cut checks. No publisher has taken me up on the bet, and for good reason.

I'm tempted to bet that Warren can write a Destroyer faster than you can read it, but I don't think I'd win that one. Read one and you'll know why.

- Richard Curtis